Late Capitalism Stoicism (somewhat)

 

I read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations in college, and have continued to return to the work for thirty years now.  Recently I was excited to see Stoicism experiencing something of a revival.  This brings me to The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday. Written in the radically pragmatic spirit of the “late” Roman era Stoics, Holiday does some interesting work in this book.  

But for me, Stoicism is not useful for “turning trials into triumphs” but rather accepting the trials of life with equanimity.  The beginning of Holiday’s book reads like an advertisement for entrepreneurial capitalism.  I am not interested in this at all, and too much of an emphasis on "success" distorts Stoicism. 

Toward the end the author turns to more serious Stoic topics – including the fine art of disengaging from a reality... being less connected with things that enslave us.  It seems the author wrote the first half purposefully optimistic, so as not to turn off readers.  So if this author’s voice bothers you in the first half, hang on, he will turn things around and develop a more rounded vision.

The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual

 

In The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual by Ward Farnsworth the reader will find a very rigorous treatment of Stoic philosophy, and its innumerable applications to our lives.  Farnsworth makes ample use of Seneca, who throughout history has had his Stoic credentials questioned.  Farnsworth shows us that Seneca’s seeming Stoic unorthodoxy is very well suited to our time.  Seneca’s less doctrinaire approach to Stoicism can be well-adapted to the Neo-Stoicism this is flourishing today.  This is an important book for our uncertain times.

The Telling & the Cultural Revolution

 

The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin hits all the high notes that her great, and very good novels reach. This is a richly imagined world, a planet in the midst of social, political and religious transformation – and Sutty, the observer from Terra, is our compassionate witness and guide.

This novel has shades of the Chinese Cultural Revolution – and Chinese religion and philosophy – rendered to great effect.  Le Guin takes elements of China and mixes them with this world - but this is also pure creation, and wholly not derivative.  This novel stands on its down two feet.   

A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg by Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper

 

A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg by Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper charts the course of the Satmar Hasidim in their corner of Brooklyn.  Satmar wants us to think that their form of Judaism is the only game in town, and that they have not changed since their relocation to America after the Second World War.

The authors show us that quite the contrary, Satmar has adapted well to New York City, and are intimately involved in its politics, social action initiatives, and especially, with the coming of gentrification, the real estate market.  You will read a great deal about Brooklyn real estate in this book.

My take away is that there is no fundamental in fundamentalists groups; they change with the circumstances, adjust, and do what they believe is necessary for their own self-interest. They are always adjusting and new.

Our American Nightmare

 

Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, by Spencer Ackerman, outlines what we all know by now – or should.  The incredible trauma of 9-11 produced a hit of adrenaline to the sense of American exceptionalism.  Rather than learn what it was about our foreign policy that contributed to the attacks, we sought revenge on our enemies and boosted security.  This was a struggle that was black and white - with no shades of gray.

This boost in security led to what Ackerman calls the “Security State.”  Like many nations in history who have been attacked, the tools we used to protect ourselves eventually became part of our national fabric, threatening our forms of government.  "Security" was transformed to tools of oppression.

Ackerman’s book explores this, and the underlying racism in the War on Terror.  White domestic terrorists are not thrown in Gitmo.  Muslims of color are; this simmering racism, always present in America, emerged in broad daylight during the Trump presidency.  No longer does American racism need to hide decorously (if it ever did).  It can be expressed in public and violently, against all minorities, but particularly communities of color and non-Christian religious groups.  Not even the American government is exempt. 

How do we come back from this precipice?  COVID has only advanced our divisions and weaknesses.  Perhaps the American hegemon is dead.  Perhaps our cure for insecurity has killed the American experiment.

Not So Non-Binary

 

In The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin does some interesting work, but her central conceit falls short.  

This is a world where people are not sexually binary until they reach a monthly time period where they can either procreate as a male or female.  Whether a person develops male or female features appears to be random.  Unfortunately, the whole tone of the book is very masculine.  Le Guin, so amazingly inventive in many areas of this work, simply does not give these people the necessary range to be believably non-binary.

So, unless the characters are talking or thinking about their unique form of sexuality, the tone is masculine.  In this sense, the book falls far short.  Perhaps Le Guin developed this premise far too early; today, she might have the chops to pull it off.  In other areas, particularly politics and ecology, Le Guin succeeds in creating a fully realized world, rendered in perfect prose.

The Belzec Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance

 

The Belzec Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance by Chris Webb is the most recently written book about one of the least known of the three major camps constructed for Operation Reinhardt, the mass murder of the Jews of Poland.  

The camp was “primitive” by the standards of what came later; in many ways, it was an experiment in stationary mass murder.  Before this time, more than a million Soviet Jews had been murdered by mobile SS execution units.  The Reinhardt camps, Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka, were meant to use the least resources possible to murder the most Jews, while exposing only a small number of Germans to a personal connection with murder.

Despite its prototype nature, Webb explains how Belzec was employed with brutal efficient.  In about ten months of operation, more than half a million or more Jews were killed, along with Roma and Sini peoples.  This comes out to about ten percent of all victims of the Shoah – all these killings, burials, cremations, sorting of goods, was done on a piece of land of about than sixteen acres.  Only one-hundred Ukrainian guards supervised by a little more than twenty German staff murdered half a million people on a small plot of land.  Webb explains that the camp was designed to kill and only kill.  We know of only seven survivors of Belzec.

Webb also shows us how Belzec’s ultimate fate was what the Nazis wished for all the murdered Jews of Europe. Bodies were cremated, bones crushed, ashes buried,  buildings dismantled, the Jewish workers killed, and trees were planted.  A “farm” was built on the site; Belzec was designed to kill Jews and then to be forgotten.  Ultimately, had the war turned out differently, this would have been the fate of all the camps - and of Europe's Jews.